Now I Know The Answer To Love

Poetic book review of The Beautiful Possible by Amy Gottlieb

Photo by Divyan Rajveer Rana on Unsplash

When I first mistook
your silence for absence,
I forgot how the wind
still spoke to me.
It was a dry season
in my throat.

Too many questions.
Not enough breath
to hold the answers.
So I fled to the desert,
finding peace in less.
I buried my heart in the sand,
constantly conjuring
the breath of an undefined
spiritnight until a well resurrected me.

Forty years later,
I whispered Hineni.
I am here.

Those wilderness years
taught me this about love.

It doesn’t always speak.
Sometimes it chants.
Sometimes it disappears mid-sentence
and returns inside a poem.
Sometimes it smells
like myrrh or wet earth.
Sometimes it stings
like an unanswered She’elah.